


Second Star To The Left

by GuardianKarenTerrier



Series: Starships Are Meant To Fly [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Families of Choice, Foul Language, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Second Person, Space Dorks, Space Pirates, Strong Language, Team as Family, Violent, Whether You Like It Or Not, You're Crew Now, and sometimes very murderous people, foul-mouthed space crew, kidnapping references, parts of this are turning into peter pan in space, past slavery references, these are the very violent space dorks, these are very violent people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 18:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7769347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuardianKarenTerrier/pseuds/GuardianKarenTerrier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not actually a good idea to go jetting off into space with some clearly crazy stranger you met once in a dive bar, but it's not like you had other plans.  You've been drifting and directionless for so long it feels like the ground state of being. </p><p>Then you find yourself caught up with a new crew and a Captain whose title you frankly suspect is an outright lie, and you still don't have an actual direction and if anyone on this drifting deathtrap has a planned destination you will space yourself, but what you do all share is the journey. </p><p>(You're also starting to suspect you may not survive said journey, but you think that's probably worth it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Star To The Left

**Author's Note:**

> In contrast to my other space dorks, these are my violent-venting-pirate space dorks. I just really like writing about space crews family dynamics, to my own surprise.
> 
> (Also, I'm quite aware that's the wrong star. It's supposed to be).

 

 

The first time you see her, she’s standing on top of a table in the middle of a bar brawl (you were observing and not participating for a round), and she’d started stomping and yelling “Who wants to join a fuckin’ REVOLUTION!” while whirling two bent forks around like she thought they were shitty nunchaku. (That would have been more hilarious and less alarming had she not already stabbed like six people with them, one of them right in the goddamned eyes).

Three hours later you’re piloting the escape shuttle as she leans out the back hatch and screams obscenities at what passed for law enforcement out here at the ass end of the universe. Dropping the hatch on her head, you wait until she ducks back into the copilot’s seat and glares at you before you say, “Duck.”

She kicks you out of the shuttle half a solar system over on an unfamiliar planet and you don’t think you’ll ever see her again.

Six days later she shows up at _that_ bar, casually kicks a table up as a shield, hurls a smoke bomb into the crowd, throws a punch, grabs you by the arm and hauls you back outside. You stare at her, only for her to greet you with, “Sup. M’name’s Jamie, by the way. Captain Rasmussen of the Renegade. But, y’know, crew calls me Jamie.”

You stare at her some more.

“Welcome to the crew?” she tries, grin never faltering. “Shuttle’s at the back of the lot, let’s go before the mob catches on? Hey sexy did you get a concussion when you fell from heaven ‘cause your ass is fine?”

“What the fuck.”

“It speaks!” She throws up both her arms, dragging your arm along. “Now c’mon already hot stuff, I’m _trying_ to kidnap your fine ass.”

“You’re trying to what now?” You try and tug your arm away. Jamie leans all her weight on it as she yanks you to the parked shuttle. It’s the same one the two of you stole, somehow in much worse condition than it was when you last saw it less than a week ago. There’s actual graffiti on the wings, how does that even happen.

“M’kidnappin’ ya,” Jamie repeats patiently, though she’s currently trying her best to both open the passenger door and force you into the shuttle at the same time so the explanation’s not really necessary. It’s also not really explanatory. “Also there was some hittin’ on ya in there but that’s jus’how I interact with folks.”

“Ow, ow, stop that, I’m going- _why_ am I getting kidnapped, okay, I helped you out _once_ , did you just decide I was on your crew a few minutes ago? Because I’m pretty sure I heard something about that somewhere in the babble.”

“Yep! ‘Grats, you’re a crew member, welcome to the Renegade, we got jackets.”

“Hey I did not agree to this-“ You’re already sliding over to the pilot’s seat, though, and she’s grinning like a shark as she swaps seats with you and leans over to punch in coordinates. “Were you this charming to the rest of your crew?”

“Ain’t that many of us.” Jamie lounged against the seat, somehow taking up far more space than you despite being something like half your size. The woman was tiny. Terrifying, but tiny. “But yeah kinda. I mean. Flynn and Errol snuck on, we kinda stole Mads, I think Scott mighta been on the ship from th’start?” She shrugged.

“How do you not- you stole- you have-“ You sigh and throttle down exasperation, channeling it into steering the shuttle through the atmosphere. You’re glad to leave this planet, it might actually have been worse than the one Jamie’d first found you on. “You stole the ship in the first place, didn’t you.”

“Hey man, we prefer to think of it as liberatin’ her.” Jamie can’t seem to stay still, now throwing her arms along the backrest, now leaning forward, now twisting to peer intensely at you and bat at your eyepatch. “I only stole some crew members, ship was a rescue mission.”

You grab her hand, not in time to keep the patch from slipping down. Wincing, you shove it back, but not before she gets a glimpse of your eye.

“Huh.”

You don’t say anything, gritting your teeth as you break atmo and navigate towards where you’re sure she left her ship. There’s an asteroid belt in this system and hell if she isn’t just dense enough to have parked over by it, hopefully not _in_ it but it’s more than possible.

“Wouldn’t ha’thought you’d be th’kind t’go for the biogrades.” Her accent’s getting thicker the more comfortable she gets around you. You still can’t place it. It isn’t from any of the solar systems you’re familiar with.

“I’m _not_ ,” you grit out, hands clenching on the steering apparatus. “Wasn’t my idea.”

“Ah.” Jamie rubs at the back of her head and finally looks at least a little bit uncomfortable, then soldiers bravely on anyway. “So how badly did they fuck it up?”

“What-“ You jerk towards her a little at her words, then curse under your breath and course-correct. “What makes you think they did.”

“Aside from th’eyepatch?” Jamie says dryly. “And the fact that ‘hey let’s mix all th’colors together and see what happens!’ ain’t a preferred eye color anywhere?”

Gritting your teeth again, you mutter, “Yeah, besides all of that.”

“I’ve seen you in two different barfights and you always flinch either too early or too late, your depth perception’s fucked. And your peripheral ain’t great either.” She side-eyes you. You wonder maliciously for a moment whether she thinks you can’t see that, either. “An’ it can’t ha’been too long ago, y’adjusted a lot more even in the last six days. So what happened?”

You’re almost at the asteroid belt. She hasn’t said anything about it so you’re assuming you surmised her parking spot correctly. “I woke up.”

Too bright lights and too-sharp giggling and the smell of cheap alcohol and before they’d finished and gone on to the other eye, thank all the little gods. There’d been a green sheen over everything on your right side (the gods alone know why, the eye sure as hell didn’t end up green, if that’s a color they were trying for this had not even qualified as a rousing failure) but not for long, not since you waking up threw the surgeon (fucking joke) off balance and things had just taken a steep dive downhill from there.

Between that and the surgery lights, you have not been holding out hope for ever recovering that half of your vision.

“Well,” Jamie is saying cheerfully, and you abruptly wonder if she’s been chattering like this because she realized she was on your blind side. She wasn’t so talkative before.  You’re not actually sure how to feel about that, it really hasn’t been that long and the only other people who’d known are not ones you’d wanted knowing. “Who do I get to kill?”

You snort. “No one. She’s dead. I didn’t exactly wake up happy.”

“Good for you. Hey, over here, we’re behind that asteroid.” You head for where you would have docked on the Breadbasket out of habit, then blink and adjust when you realize Jamie’s ship has got some bizarre structural weirdness going on. “Guess your old flame shouldn’t’ve given y’any kind of mind powers before pissing you off, huh?”

“Oh like hell,” you say, almost blankly. “There weren’t any mind powers involved, shit was entirely cosmetic, she just wanted everyone to be up to her fuckin’ standards of pretty. And she was so far from being an ‘old flame’ it isn’t funny.” The docking bay is in such a weird place. It’s almost on the very top of the ship, you have to angle the shuttle bizarrely to land it. _Renegade_ is splashed all over the hull in massive, vibrant lettering, because clearly Jamie and her crew have no concept of subtlety whatsoever.

“Yeah?” Jamie hops over you as you struggle with the seatbelt. You didn’t realize before that sometime between when she left you planetside and when she came back to get you the belt got seriously busted up. You wonder again _why_ she came back for you, because none of her explanations have been any help.  This is a bad idea in so many ways.  “So then how’d she get th’drop on you?”

“She was my commander. I didn’t think I _had_ to have my guard up around her.” You half-clamber, half-fall out of the shuttle.

Jamie eyes you funny as she leads the way into the ship’s interior. “Well I didn’t think this was something I needed t’clarify, but keep your guard up, just, all the time here. Can’t trust any of my crew, especially not the captain.” She snickers to herself like that wasn’t an awful, awful joke, then says, “Hell’s your name, anyway?”

“Sasha,” you say, looking around and taking in that the ship is actually pretty cavernous on the inside. It looks like it was stripped and rebuilt from the inside out at some point in its sorry existence. “My name is Sasha.”

“Well, Sash, time t’introduce y’to the rest of our crew,” Jamie says, gesturing grandly before her at where the hallway opens up. It isn’t the bridge- it looks like a common area. Truth to tell, this ship has a common room that would hardly look out of place in a boarding school planetside. There’s even a beat-up old couch shoved up against the (oddly curved, what has this ship got against straight lines) wall, complete with a shitty old television and more than one game system that all look old enough to be antiques. Where did they even _get_ those? How are they powering them? Are they seriously siphoning energy from their own ship to play ancient video games?

Jamie surveys the room with her hands on her hips, tilts her head and sighs. “Or not. Guess everyone scattered again. Okay, I’m seeing who is actually doing their job, bunks are second level up, pick out an empty one. You’ll meet the crew anyway, they’ll be around. I think Scott sleeps in the galley.”

“ _In_ the galley,” you repeat faintly.

She shrugs.  “Well, I really never see him leave, and there is definitely a hammock stashed in one of th'cabinets.” She looks around the common room again. “I’m… going to go make sure Flynn isn’t setting anything on fire. Again, bunks are second level, go nuts. Number of empty ones, obviously stay outta the occupied ones, try not to shoot anyone and if you hear any shouting please, for the love of Eldest Gaia, _dodge_.”

After that less-than-reassuring advice, Jamie tosses off a backwards wave and bolts off in, presumably, the direction of the bridge.

It takes you a while to locate the second level. Corridors branch off in all directions, seemingly at random, and an improbable number of them lead to dead ends.  One of the dead ends has a hammock and a bedside table crammed into it, which you can understand after an hour’s wandering has brought you nowhere near your destination.  You've found a grand total of two actual rooms and one of them is a training room while the other appears to be the equivalent of a broom closet.

Three hours later, you give up and start trying to find the bridge again instead. It takes you _another_ hour of wandering, but you find a series of corridors where someone has thoughtfully added color-coded arrows to the branching halls (this ship is _ridiculously huge,_ where did she even _get_ this thing).  You… have no idea what the color code actually _is_ , but you opt to go with green because fuck it, you like green.

Green brings you back to the common room, which is no longer unoccupied. Jamie is back, and she lights up when she sees you and waves her arms all around to encompass the now-crowded room. “Time to meet the team, new guy!”

The crew is a bunch of kids.

You don’t know why you’re surprised.

You don't meet the cook. Apparently Jamie was serious about his never leaving the kitchen.  You meet Errol, who can’t be any older than twelve and is the ship's senior mechanic.  His brother is the same age or younger, you don’t believe they’re actually mechanics for one second, and if Errol and Flynn are their real names then you're a native of Eldest Gaia.

Also, spacing anyone under the age of fifteen is illegal as hell in most all quadrants, and that applies to Madison as well, the girl who apparently lives in the third-floor corridors. As in, the entirety of them.  She looks even younger than Errol, doesn't say much, and has very obvious biogrades in the form of bioluminescent stripes in her hair and down both arms. The two of you exchange a tired, understanding look.

(Biogrades aren't even considered _safe_ for anyone under eighteen, and you have a sudden very strong flashback to Jamie saying, "...We kinda stole Mads.")

That's it for the humans. There's a kytie who introduces himself as Jax, and who isn't even old enough yet to have settled on a final physical form, and there's a trill who goes by Skoshi who doesn't have zer wings yet.

That's around when you realise you're pretty sure you're older than Jamie herself, too.

That's it. That's the crew. That isn't enough people to crew a ship this size even if they were all hyper competent (they're not) and you're clearly no less doomed than before, but at least you're doomed in company now.

The elusive cook, Scott, actually is your age or older, but he’s the one Jamie said they stole with the ship and he doesn’t seem at all interested in anything happening outside the galley.  Actually, you could wish he was a little more interested in what was happening _inside_ the galley; you’re pretty sure the first three meals you eat shipboard qualify as war crimes in some systems. You’re pretty sure the only reason they don’t qualify as one in _this_ system is that you’d gone deliberately out of your way to end up in a lawless part of space.

It looks like that may have worked out in your favor. It’s too early yet to tell.

Jamie’s got the ship set to a thirty-three hour day/night cycle for some reason, with daytime lighting (either she sprang for or stole the good solareplica strips, and you know which of _those_ options you believe) for twenty hours and mostly-darkness the remaining thirteen. Mostly, because the majority of the ship has got faintly glowing strips along the floor to prevent injuries while wandering at night. (Well, what counts as night).

This turns out to be because _everyone_ wanders around at night.

You don’t discover this at first.  What you discover first is how mystifying it actually is that this ship runs at all.  Jamie doesn’t seem to actually understand how autopilot works; she regularly sets a course and wanders off and you find yourself racing through the maze of corridors to the bridge to make sure you don’t all go plowing into an asteroid field. Somehow, the dents in the hull have become considerably less surprising.

You've given up on finding the bunks by now. Honestly, you aren't convinced they exist; none of the others seem to have one. The hallway-end setup belonged to Skoshi, Mads haunts the third floor, you're now in agreement with the others that Scott lives in the galley, and you _still_ haven't figured out where Jax or the twins ( _are_ they twins?) are sleeping.  Hell, in Jax's case it's possible he doesn't sleep at all, you've never actually met another kytie and don't know a ton about them.

Jamie apparently just crashes wherever the nearest flat surface is, because you have tripped over her an inordinate number of times and you're pretty sure you saw her sleeping in one of the training rooms with the anti-grav on once. (One of. There are at least three training rooms. That you know of).

 You claim an alcove on the bridge itself because you don't want _that_ short a lifespan.

There literally are jackets. Jax painted Renegade in a wild splash of colors on the back of each and added personalized patches to each shoulder. You don't have a patch yet, he says he still has to figure out what suits you, and your jacket is too short and you end up wearing it all the time.

To your surprise, you settle in. Jamie gives you a set of knives ("until you pick out a weapon of your own," she says, which should be worrying, but is now alarmingly normal to you) and you use one to idly carve a set of doodles and a few old sayings into the wall of your alcove. Mads and Flynn help you set up a shelf to hold your belongings, for when you have belongings. Skoshi invites you into zer training room one day (turns out there are enough training rooms for each of you to claim one) and gives you a crash course in throwing knives. Maybe you'll keep yours after all.

Eventually, you ask  Jamie where you're going. After all, you seem to have been travelling entirely at random for some time.

Jamie shrugs, gives you the grin you're coming to both hope for and dread, and says, "Guess we'll find out when we get there."

 


End file.
